Partners

Thanks to our Conference Organizing Collective! 

• Sarah Abbott, University of Regina, Canada

  Sarah Abbott, DSocSci, MFA, is associate professor in the Department of Film at the University of Regina. Her interdisciplinary doctorate research (Royal Roads University, 2021) explored the sentient relationality of trees in the context of ontological emergence, Indigenous research methodologies, public ethnography, plant science, interspecies communication, and film. Sarah's intertwined research areas also include issues and rights of being for humans and nonhumans, community, environmental health, and the climate crisis. She has been making films for over 20 years across documentary, fiction, experimental, and dance genres.

• Kate Flick, Wisconsin Center for Environmental Education, US

  Kate Flick is passionate about place-based education that values different ways of knowing and learning, engages in biocultural stewardship principles, and gets people outside learning from the fascinating world around them. She works as a sustainable forestry education outreach specialist with LEAF--WI K12 Forestry Education Program and more recently as Geoscience faculty with the College of Menominee Nation. She is also finishing up her PhD in Natural Resource Science and Management at the University of Minnesota. She has recently been exploring how to use storylines and observations as a tool to localize climate change through ecocultural calendars. She especially loves the lakes, water, and forests of Wisconsin. Some of her favorite forests throughout the world include Menominee Nation's forest, Schwarzwald/Black Forest--SW Germany, Coastal Redwoods--California, Van Cortland Park--Bronx, NY, River Pines Green Circle Trail, Stevens Point...but a cottonwood forest along the lakeshore is what first grabbed her attention in a forestry sense.

• Walter Furness, Texas State University, US

  Walter Furness (M.S.) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Geography at Texas State University. His current research focuses on yeast-human relationships and how synthetic biology technologies modulate those relationships across space. Previously, he studied the connections between community gardens, volunteer labor, and a regional food bank in a mid-size city in the Midwestern U.S. His interests include producing fermented goods, gardening, and traveling.

• Jean Larson, University of Minnesota, US

  Dr. Jean Larson began her work for the University of Minnesota in 1992, where she developed the Nature-Based Therapeutic Services (NBT) a partnership between the Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing and the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. NBT provides a range of services including direct programming, training, education, research and outreach in the fields of therapeutic horticulture, animal-assisted interventions, facilitated green exercise, and therapeutic landscapes. The partnership provides opportunities to better understand and ensure students, professionals and general public will have access to the most current research and practices. The unique partnership recognizes the strengths and expertise to make the best use of resources from both integrative medicine and nature-based science.

• Simon Leadbeater, Priors Environmental Ltd, UK

  After studying at Oxford Brookes and Oxford Universities, and the LSE, Simon enjoyed a career in the local government and third sectors. A defining moment for him came when he and his partner in 1999 bought a 52 acre plantation woodland in Hertfordshire, England. In 2009 they created Priors Environmental Ltd, a business consultancy, to help fund the restoration of their woodland. Simon has published in a number of areas. His book ‘The Politics of Textiles’ was published by Sage Publications, he has written for the Ecologist, the peer-reviewed Voluntary Sector Review, the Royal Forestry Society’s (RFS) Quarterly Journal of Forestry (QJF), and ECOS, the publication of the British Association of Nature Conservationists (BANC). Simon is on the steering group of GENIE, the Global Ecocentric Network for Implementing Ecodemocracy (https://ecodemocracy.net/our-team.html) and is a trustee of BANC. In recent years particularly he has dedicated much of his time and company resources to restoring the woodland, along with caring for a small flock of ‘retired’ and rescued sheep, ex-bat chickens and cockerels, and a turkey called Cuthbert.

• Alice McSherry, University of Auckland, New Zealand

  Alice McSherry (BA, BA(Hons), MA) is currently a doctoral candidate in human geography. Her research looks at human-plant relationships via traditions and practices of folk herbalism and how these represent expressions of a sentient earth ethic through embodied and emplaced practice. Alice is deeply informed and influenced by critical autoethnography and decolonizing research methods in her work and sees these as transformational pathways to being in right relationship with our more-than-human world. Alice is also a practicing community organizer, herbalist and bodyworker who is actively involved in community-based food/health sovereignty and gardening projects with local partners in her home community of Waiheke Island, Auckland, New Zealand.

• Paul Moss, University of Minnesota, US

  Paul Moss is a third-year Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota in the department of Geography, Environment and Society where he is focusing on the relationship between people and plants. He has degrees in biology, agronomy, and marketing. Paul is also founder and executive director of The Plant Initiative (https://plantinitiative.org) a nonprofit organization started in November 2020 that works collaboratively with others to advance respectful treatment of plants and which maintains an active Twitter site.

• Laura Pustarfi, California Institute of Integral Studies, US

  Laura Pustarfi, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and writer focusing on trees in the Western philosophical tradition. She completed her doctoral work in Philosophy and Religion with a focus on Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2019. Her dissertation, Arboreality: Revisioning Trees in the Western Paradigm, examines trees and plants in Western thought with particular focus on philosophical literature in order to explore an arboreal and vegetal ontology and ethics that respects plants themselves. Her interests include integral ecology, environmental philosophy, especially eco-phenomenology, and religion and ecology. She also has an enduring interest in the arts. She currently works as the Associate Director for the Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research Certificate Program at CIIS.

• Amba Sepie, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

  Amba J. Sepie, PhD Geography, is an author, teacher, and community collaborator working in the field of Earth kinship and decolonization, with a research focus that upholds and supports the distribution of traditional and indigenous knowledges (past and present). Amba is currently based at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa New Zealand.

• Duncan Stone, Scottish Natural Heritage, UK